Editorial: Guard against tyranny

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Actor George Takei is scheduled to speak Tuesday, May 8, 2018, at the Boston Public Library to discuss his experience during World War II spent in U.S. internment camps for Japanese-Americans. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

Today, George Takei, best known as Mr. Sulu, helmsman on TV’s “Star Trek,” will be at Boston Public Library discussing his experience as a child in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

In 2015, Takei spoke about the event in a heartfelt interview on Boston Herald Radio: “I’d just turned 5 years old … and my parents got my brother and my baby sister and I up very early one morning and hurriedly dressed us,” he said, “and my brother and I were in the living room looking out the window and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway with bayonets on their rifles. They stomped up the front porch, banged on the door, my father answered it and literally at gunpoint we were ordered out of our home. We went out on the driveway and waited for my mother to come out. She took quite a bit of time, and when she did finally emerge she was carrying the baby in her left arm, a huge duffle bag in the other and tears were streaming down both her cheeks. I will never forget that scene.”

Takei’s story is heartbreaking and at the same time maddening. It is unfathomable to imagine how it would be acceptable for the federal government to round up law-abiding Americans, en masse, at gunpoint, and ship them off to camps.

But it happened, and we must remember that it did.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It called for the relocation of all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast. The stated objectives at the time were to prevent spying and protect those of Japanese descent from Americans angry about the Pearl Harbor attack.

Imprisoned for their own good?

An internee famously shot back at that assertion, asking, “If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?”

About 117,000 people of Japanese descent were affected. Most were native-born American citizens.

The Roosevelt administration had feared that young Japanese-Americans would turn against the United States if the Imperial Japanese forces­ invaded the West Coast. But Japanese-­Americans believed in their United States, as they proved when they were given a chance to join the fight.

Late in the war, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was deployed to the European theater, made up almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese descent. The team became the most highly decorated unit of its kind in the war. Twenty-one members of the 442nd were awarded the Medal of Honor.

Their experiences are not unlike those of other ethnic minorities who served heroically in World War II and are an important reminder of patriotism on display overseas while injustice loomed at home.

The story of the Japanese internment camps is, among other­ things, the story of corrupt, impulsive government turned tyrannical against its own people. Always with the best intentions, of course.

That is why we must always be skeptical of government, especially when its actions threaten the fundamental liberties of its citizens. This is precisely why our government is designed to work at the behest of the people and not the other way around. Federal overreach begets more federal overreach, and the collective deliberations of massive bureaucracies — especially in times of urgency and tumult, such as war — can result in disaster and grave injustice to individuals.

As Takei told the Herald, they were sent to internment camps “simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.”

Sadly, history tells us that the ultimate motivations for Executive Order 9066 were in line with Takei’s assessment.

Eleven thousand people of German ancestry were also interned, along with 3,000 people of Italian descent. It was all wrong.

It is important that when we see the freedoms of American citizens trampled by the government apparatus, that we point it out and challenge it, whatever its form.